PilotEdge Forums

There is a freeware addon for Catalina (KAVX) for both FSX and P3D which offers a sloped runway. The only issue is that the drones sit and taxi above the ground at this airport. I wouldnt normally request this, especially on a payware airport but since this airport is freeware for all to have and offers training on a sloped runway, could it be possible to consider removing the drones from landing/taking off from this one fields as so they dont ruin it when arriving, taxing or departing from this nicely detailed airport?

Nathan Palmer

I don't fly to Catalina often, but I do enjoy the busy air traffic there. I wouldn't remove drones just because a scenery package lowered the elevation of the airport (or at least on one side). In fact it's probably not going to be just drones, but other online pilots as well that will be hovering above the ground.

This is a similar issue with us X-Plane users and the "runways follow terrain contours" feature. If we want to use it, awesome, but we'll have to put up with other traffic taxing halfway underground or hovering above us. If we don't want to put up with it, then we disable the feature. I think most of us keep it disabled.

Long term, there may be an opportunity to do some intelligent 'clamping' of targets in the near vicinity to stop them from being land sharks or floaters.

In the mean time, I have to agree with Matt. The drones at AVX are important because many of the fixed wing aircraft head out towards the Palo Verdes Peninsula and provide some traffic around Compton, which is a corridor that gets tons of IFR traffic on our network.

Keith,

As a user of X-Plane, have you been able to get around the elevation difference of the aircraft with contours unchecked? Is the airport data/meshes that different between flight sims on a constant basis? I am sure some of us have even thrown a new wrench in the mix by downloading HD mesh for X-Plane, thus creating yet another elevation variable. Maybe Runway Follows Contours = OFF corrects this for the different meshes within X-Plane.

The installation documentation for the PE plugin for XPlane states that terrain contours needs to be turned off.

Long term, there is a plan for dealing with terrain differences, but there's a lot of things that are ahead of it in the queue.